The Sunday Salon: Mexico, documentaries, and cupcakes

March 27, 2011

I spent all of last week in Mexico with my little sister and my parents. I hadn’t been to Mexico since I was a small child, so this was different – most years, we go on vacation to the Dominican Republic. It just happened to work out this year that the flight was super cheap to Mexico for the break, so that’s where we went. We stayed in a brand new condo-style resort, which was also really nice. It meant that we got a nice mix of making our own food most of the day (thus fairly healthy) and eating local food in restaurants for dinner. We spent most of the week lying around in the sun, although we also spent a day going ziplining in the jungle on the set of Predator.

Yup, that’s me in the middle of the trees, clinging for dear life (or not) from that rope.

If you’re interested in checking out the resort and ocean view that I had (including my ever-so-slick commentary), you can watch the video I created here.

After coming back, I basically didn’t do much this week except work, go to the gym, and sleep. And when I say that I slept, I really mean it – I slept 16 hours straight from Friday night to Saturday morning, and that wasn’t the first overly-long night of sleep that I had. I think I’m finally caught up on sleep, though, so hopefully this week will be a little bit more productive.

Me and my pass. Isn’t it cute?

I did, however, make some arrangements this week for something absolutely fantastic a month from now – I got myself a premium festival pass for HotDocs! A few years ago, I started seeing one or two films every year at the festival, and last year Zaid and I went to see a bunch, including a really awesome one called Budrus, about one man’s pacifist attempt to keep his village in one piece in Palestine instead of being bisected by the “security fence”. I went to see a few more films than Zaid (9 in total, whereas I think he came to maybe 6 or 7 with me), including another fantastic one called 12th & Delaware, about the ongoing battle to do with abortion in the United States, focusing on a specific street corner where there is both an abortion clinic and a “pregnancy care center”. Needless to say, I saw a lot of awesome films that week, and I didn’t even get to see as many as I had originally wanted to. To avoid that problem, this year I finally got myself a premium festival pass – which means that I can go to as many screenings as I want! I get a ticket to any film that I want to see, as long as the screenings don’t run at the same time. I have a crazy packed schedule worked out for that week already, and I’m looking forward to it like you wouldn’t believe!

Don’t you just want to eat them right up?

And now for a last fun thing to include – today, I made cupcakes! Two kinds, to be precise: lemon poppyseed cupcakes and carrot cupcakes with blood orange icing. They’re so tasty! I’m bringing a dozen of each kind with me to work in the morning for a staff meeting, and the rest will be staying at home for my roommate and I to eat. Hopefully slowly, but probably not so much. *grin* I’m excited that it’s getting warmer and sunnier overall, because it means that I’m generally in a much better mood, and that means more fun things being made in my kitchen. (Until now, it’s been almost nothing except various forms of soup for months now.) Maybe I’ll even start sharing pictures of my kitchen-capades more often here now that I’m starting up with the Sunday Salon. And hopefully there will be less glitches in the future – today, I was so scatter-brained that I had to run out to the corner convenience store not once, but twice! I had to go out for icing sugar the first time, and didn’t realize until later that I would also be short on eggs and white flour. Oh well. At least it got me out in the fresh air a couple times.

A festival pass?! That’s awesome. We have an international film festival here as well and I’ve always wanted to get a pass to be able to see any film any time I want. You’ll have such a wonderful time.

Indeed! We have the bigger one – Toronto International Film Festival – in September, and I haven’t gotten around to seeing as much of those as I do at HotDocs. I guess I’m just more “into” indie films when they’re documentaries than when they’re fiction. 🙂

Oh drats, you made cupcakes and I’m not around to go visit 😉 hee hee hee. The documentary film festival sounds really awesome. I might have to check it out and maybe tag along to one or two with you if you don’t mind 😀